Music's Cultural Payload
Bridging the gap between cognitive theory and compositional identity.
An exploration of how music theory, cognitive science, and machine listening intersect to define the ‘hidden soul’ of musical identity.
An ongoing collection of essays, arguments, and reflections on music — its cognitive architecture, its resistance to computational reduction, and its stubborn insistence on meaning. The writing here sits at the intersection of music theory, machine listening, and cultural thought, and exists because these ideas are worth working out in public.
Music as Data: Understanding Our Sonic World
Why music-centric AI requires more than just tokenized data.
An exploration of why music cognition operates outside of language systems, and the technical challenges of segmenting music for intelligent AI systems.
Examples vs. Ideas: The Ghost in the Machine
Italo Calvino, computational creativity, and the search for artistic genius.
Exploring the distinction between statistical prediction and genuine creative inspiration, and why the future of AI art lies in a machine’s ability to produce ‘disorder’.
The Search for Universal Musical Value
Darwinian evolution and the cognitive constraints of musical memes.
An exploration of how cultural evolution and cognitive constraints shape musical value, and why these ‘musical memes’ are essential for developing intelligent AI systems.
AI That Understands Why Music is Beautiful
Why AI must treat musical data as a vehicle for emotional impact.
An investigation into how we can translate the ’timeless patterns’ of musical expectation, tension, and resolution into code for AI systems that resonate.
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